27 items tagged “politics”
2024
Follow the Crypto (via) Very smart new site from Molly White tracking the huge increase in activity from Cryptocurrency-focused PACs this year. These PACs have already raised $203 million and spent $38 million influencing US elections in 2024.
Right now Molly's rankings show that the "Fairshake" cryptocurrency PAC is second only to the Trump-supporting "Make America Great Again Inc" in money raised by Super PACs this year - though it's 9th in the list that includes other types of PAC.
Molly's data comes from the FEC, and the code behind the site is all open source.
There's lots more about the project in the latest edition of Molly's newsletter:
Did you know that the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections in the United States than the oil industry? More than the pharmaceutical industry?
In fact, the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections than the entire energy sector and the entire health sector. Those industries, both worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, are being outspent by an industry that, even by generous estimates, is worth less than $20 billion.
Voters in the Clapham and Brixton Hill constituency can rest easy - despite appearances, their Reform candidate Mark Matlock really does exist. [...] Matlock - based in the South Cotswolds, some 100 miles from the constituency in which he is standing - confirmed: "I am a real person." Although his campaign image is Al-generated, he said this was for lack of a real photo of him wearing a tie in Reform's trademark turquoise.
LLMs may offer immense value to society. But that does not warrant the violation of copyright law or its underpinning principles. We do not believe it is fair for tech firms to use rightsholder data for commercial purposes without permission or compensation, and to gain vast financial rewards in the process. There is compelling evidence that the UK benefits economically, politically and societally from upholding a globally respected copyright regime.
We believe that AI tools are at their best when they incorporate and represent the full diversity and breadth of human intelligence and experience. [...] Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression– including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents–it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.
2023
The EU AI Act now proposes to regulate “foundational models”, i.e. the engine behind some AI applications. We cannot regulate an engine devoid of usage. We don’t regulate the C language because one can use it to develop malware. Instead, we ban malware and strengthen network systems (we regulate usage). Foundational language models provide a higher level of abstraction than the C language for programming computer systems; nothing in their behaviour justifies a change in the regulatory framework.
2020
I Lived Through A Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now (via) If, like me, you have been avoiding the word “coup” since it feels like a clear over-reaction to what’s going on, I challenge you to read this piece and not change your mind.
How much can you learn from just two columns?
Derek Willis shared an intriguing dataset this morning: a table showing every Twitter account followed by an official GOP congressional Twitter account.
[... 951 words]2019
Practical campaign security is a wood chipper for your hopes and dreams. It sits at the intersection of 19 kinds of status quo, each more odious than the last. You have to accept the fact that computers are broken, software is terrible, campaign finance is evil, the political parties are inept, the DCCC exists, politics is full of parasites, tech companies are run by arrogant man-children, and so on.
What the Hell is Going On? (via) David Perell discusses how the shift from information scarcity to information abundance is reshaping commerce, education, and politics. Long but worthwhile.
2018
Analyzing US Election Russian Facebook Ads
Two interesting data sources have emerged in the past few weeks concerning the Russian impact on the 2016 US elections.
[... 922 words]Exploring the UK Register of Members Interests with SQL and Datasette
Ever wondered which UK Members of Parliament get gifted the most helicopter rides? How about which MPs have been given Christmas hampers by the Sultan of Brunei? (David Cameron, William Hague and Michael Howard apparently). Here’s how to dig through the Register of Members Interests using SQL and Datasette.
[... 1,167 words]2010
Miss Wilson, when she was a resident superintendent in this Palace, had a cat that apparently caught up to 60 mice a night. The corpses were then swept up in the morning. Finally, does the noble Lord recognise the fire hazard that mice pose, because they eat through insulating cables? It would be a tragedy for this beautiful Palace to burn down for lack of a cat.
They Write For You. I helped put together this visualisation of stories written by MPs for various newspapers at last Friday’s ��Hackers and Hacks" hack day.
2009
Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team at Guardian HQ to prepare for the release. Here’s what we built:
[... 2,081 words]HTTP + Politics = ? Mark Nottingham ponders the technical implications of Australia’s decision to apply a filter to all internet traffic. Australia is large enough (and far enough away from the northern hemisphere) that the speed of light is a performance issue, but filtering technologies play extremely poorly with optimisation technologies such as HTTP pipelining and Google’s SPDY proposal.
MoD sticks with insecure browser. Tom Watson MP used parliamentary written answers to find out that the majority of government departments still require their staff to use IE6, and not all of them have upgrade plans to 7 or 8. Not a single department considered an alternative browser. “Many civil servants use web browsers as a tool of their trade. They’re as important as pens and paper. So to force them to use the most decrepit browser in the world is a rare form of workplace cruelty that should be stopped.”
Early Day Motion to support Bletchley Park Museum. Time to fire up WriteToThem.com and drop your MP a friendly note of encouragement.
The Straight Choice | The election leaflet project. Nice crowdsourcing app by Richard Pope, Francis Irving and Julian Todd—UK political leaflets are hard to keep tabs on due to the way they are distributed over small geographical areas, so this site encourages you to take photos of leaflets delivered to your home and tag them with postcode, party and key topics.
We are facing an economic crisis that is within our capacity to solve, and an ecological crisis that we lack the political means to prevent. It's only by failing at the former that we might have a chance at surviving the latter.
2008
Obama ’08 for iPhone (via) Slick app, impressive for a three week turnaround. I’m guessing it uses the phone number area codes in your address book to arrange your friends by state for the “call your friends” feature, which is an ingeniously simple hack.
Growing the ORG community. The Open Rights Group want a fiver a month from 750 new people to support their excellent work fighting for digital civil liberties in the UK political arena. Going by their past performance this is a very worthwhile investment.
A Look at the Presidential Candidates. The Big Picture (the Boston Globe’s fantastic photojournalism blog) presents a fascinating collection of historical photos of Senators Barack Obama and John McCain.
2007
Google Reader ruins Christmas (via) New sharing feature automatically reveals shared items to Gmail contacts, causing political rows.
Death and Taxes (via) Beautiful massive zoomable/pannable infographic of the 2008 Federal Discretionary Budget.
Discourse DB. A collaborative effort to collect the opinions of the world’s journalists and commentators about ongoing political events and issues, powered by Semantic MediaWiki so there’s metadata coming out of its ears.
2006
’National interest’ halts arms corruption inquiry. “It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest.”
2004
They Work For You
Today is/was (you never can tell with these wretched time zone differences) NotCon 2004, London’s premiere low-cost, informal, one-day technology conference. Friday’s MiniNTK promised the unveiling of a new project from the people behind FaxYourMP and PublicWhip
and sure enough, here it is: TheyWorkForYou.com.